People keep overprocessing nebula photos until they look like cartoon soup

I was scrolling through the top posts this week and half of them have that same blown out orange and blue color palette where the details just get mashed into a blur. I get that stretching the data brings out faint stuff, but there's a line between enhancing and just cranking saturation to 11. I saw one of Orion that looked more like a 90s poster than actual gas clouds. How do you tell when a photo has gone past real into fake without starting a fight in the comments?

2 comments

2 Comments

wesley_hart1mo ago

Tbh that's just the cosmic滤镜 of space Instagram.

iris_mason881mo ago

Oh man, I actually saw a news blurb about that cosmic glitch thing. Scientists are saying it's like the universe is playing tricks on our measurements or something, right?